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This continued connection to masculinity further evidences that even when strides are made in female representations, the strides occur within familiar, acceptable frames-those in which men still have a central role to play. Hence, the memes-in an attempt to address this discomfort-narratively place her in a male role. We find that while women are visually narrated in a manner more akin to that of male athletes-emphasizing strength, competency and confidence-this is in part a result of a heteronormative discomfort with Megan Rapinoe’s sexuality. Through the lens of performativity and narrative, this chapter examines the memes regarding the women’s soccer team distributed in June and July 2019 during the FIFA World Cup. The team’s visible, inarguable athletic success created a social media “echo” in which the performative presentation of gender necessitated a discursive conversation through memes. Through the medium of memes, narratives about the individual athlete can sometimes spiral out of the athletes reach and become at best, an avenue for critique and, at worst, a way of amplifying hate speech. Photo-shopped Obama salutes, in addition to Big Bird, binder, and bayonet memes, express not only political identities but also larger cultural values within networked popular culture. Normative assumptions about these memes would portray this trafficking as destructive to deliberative democracy but when understood as a generative cultural practice, trolling becomes central to articulating political emotions in social networks. The paper seeks to conceptualise trolling as a broader cultural practice, which can be considered political. Obama trolling is facilitated through the techno-cultural affordances of memes, which can only become public because of their mimetic form and sterilised partial anonymity. This paper tracks the cultural practices and logics of 'sharing' political memes and conceptualises memes as part of an agonistic public sphere and media ecology. The 'crotch salute', 'left-hand salute', and 'Veterans Day non-salute' serve as case studies for understanding the role of trolling in the public sphere and Internet politics in an era of social networks and circulation.
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During the 2012 presidential campaign an explosion of photo-shopped images circulated that depicted President Obama as unpatriotic.